Restoring Vision in South Sudan: Dispatches From the Duk Lost Boys Clinic

Dr. Geoff Tabin at the Duk Lost Boys Clinic, South Sudan

Jordan Campbell (pictured below) is on a medical mission to the remote and underserved region of Duk Payuel in South Sudan, the world’s newest country. He is assisting two ophthalmic surgeons—Dr. Geoff Tabin and Dr. Alan Crandall, both game-changers in the way eye care is being delivered in the developing world. Their work begins in the Duk Lost Boys Clinic, which was stared by John Dau, one of the original Lost Boys of Sudan and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. Campbell is a Marmot Ambassador Athlete based in Colorado.

DAY 1

Flying over South Sudan’s vast and desolate landscape, brush fires blaze thousands of feet below us, wafting smoke over the wings of our eight-person aircraft. The fires are lit intentionally by the numerous indigenous tribes to fertilize the parched, unforgiving soil. But the sight of plumes coming from the ground also makes me nervous. Despite South Sudan’s recent independence in July 2011, the world’s newest country has been plagued by 40 years of civil war with their northern neighbors in Sudan, and the situation between the now two countries remains tenuous.

Seated next to me are two ophthalmic surgeons—Dr. Geoff Tabin and Dr. Alan Crandall, both game-changers in how eye care is being delivered in the developing world. If Africa is a gaping hole for the blind and underserved, South Sudan is ground-zero.

Video: Paragliding Mozambique Where No One Has Before

The Dune Discovery- paragliding where no one has before from Offshore Odysseys on Vimeo.

"Flying a site like this is like having an out-of-body experience," says Gavin McClurg of paragliding above the shape-shifting sand dunes on 20-mile-long Bazaruto Island. "You are looking out at the Indian Ocean's turquoise waters churning endlessly from one huge lagoon at high tide to massive sand islands and rivers at low." And they had the added rush of being the first to paraglide there. Seasoned adventurer McClurg and photographer Jody MacDonald found this spot while sailing the world to kiteboard, surf, and paraglide where no one has done so before on an expedition they call "The Best Odyssey." "There was no sign of people—just serene beauty in every direction," says McClurg. "And you're flying above soft sand, so no helmet or shoes were even necessary! Rarely is paragliding so stress-free and just pure fun."

See more in our Extreme Photo of the Week gallery >>

Video: Street Trials Pro Bike Rider Danny MacAskill Plays Cape Town

Last January, NG Adventure writer Tetsuhiko Endo interviewed Scottish biking sensation Danny MacAskill about his phenomenal talent on two wheels, which has become an Internet sensation. Here, get a look at his new video, shot on the streets of Cape Town, South Africa.

Extreme Photo of the Week: Biking Table Mountain, South Africa (Free Wallpaper!)

Photograph by Nick Muzik, Caters News Agency

Download the desktop wallpaper and see previous Extreme Photos of the Week.

"Riding on top of Table Mountain was something I had to do," says professional mountain biker Kenny Belaey. "The landscape is just perfect for trials—but I had to be really careful." Belaey pulled out every daredevil trick imaginable, from wheelies to bunny hops, to explore the famous 3,558-foot slab of granite overlooking Cape Town. To reach the top at sunrise, he hiked through the night, carrying his 20-pound bike on his back.

Elephant Ivory Project: Explorers Finally Find Ample Elephant Dung, Begin Journey Home

By Andy Maser; Photographs by Andy Maser and Trip Jennings, Elephant Ivory Project, EP Films

We were recovering at our Obenge base camp when we heard the strange screams. “Pardon Papa! Pardon Papa!” over and over again, with a sound like bamboo being chopped down prompting each yell. Effrin, a local guide, pointed to the corner of camp and explained in half French, half English that Major Guy was whipping a 16-year-old boy for raping an 11-year-old girl earlier that day in the village. It was a wakeup call, just in case we needed one—we were still in Congo, where you should always expect anything.

Elephant Ivory Project: Young Explorers Face Poachers, Bush Meat, and No Sign of Elephants

Riding a motorbike through the savannah

By Trip Jennings and Kyle Dickman; Photographs by Terese Hart and the Bonobo in Congo Project

There was a shootout. Andy and I weren’t there, but we learned through satellite text messages that Colonel Gui and his soldiers from the Congolese army ran into the bandits somewhere between Kisangani and Obenge—likely the brothers of Colonel Toms, a convicted war criminal and poacher. A gunfight ensued. One poacher was injured and two others were apprehended. Colonel Gui, with his prisoners in tow, is still coming to Obenge to root out poachers in the region. We should see them tomorrow. I got the news during a four-day sampling hike through TL2 with Andy and the scientist John Hart.

But let me back up. After Kisangani, which is from where I last blogged, we flew to Kindu, a town on the border of the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2. It's the region Elephant Ivory Project leader Samuel Wasser wants elephant dung samples from most (read the previous posts to understand why). From Kindu, the three of us spent two days on the back of motorbikes, riding dirt paths notched into the jungle and savannah. These paths are arteries out of the bush. We saw locals pushing bicycles loaded with everything from pineapples to bush meat in the form of monkeys and okapi, a striped cousin of the giraffe. At the Lomami River, we loaded into motorized pirogues for a supposed two-day trip north to Obenge, the Hart’s research camp in the northern part of the proposed Lomami National Park. John stopped at every riverside village—about a dozen—to explain what the national park meant for the locals.

Elephant Ivory Project: Explorers Begin Jungle Motorcycle Trek to Collect Elephant Dung—and Confront Enraged Poacher

By Trip Jennings and Kyle Dickman; Photographs courtesy Kyle Dickman, Skip Brown, and Terese Hart

We just arrived this morning and I already want to leave Kisangani, a city of 700,000 in the center of Congo’s jungle. A cholera outbreak started in the city last week and left 27 dead—200 more cases have been reported. Andy and I are with Terese and John Hart, conservationists who have been working in the DRC for 30 years. They’ve agreed to help us plan our mission. But the question of where to start sampling elephant dung isn’t simple. The region Dr. Wasser wants us to sample most, the proposed Lomami National Park in the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2, has become even more dangerous.

The Harts, who have been a driving force behind the creation of Lomani National Park, had just received a letter from the one of their TL2-based supporters. It warned them of a man who is calling himself Moses and planting burning crosses—death threats—in the front yards of people who support the creation of Lomami National Park. President Kabila is expected to approve the park this year. That declaration could crack down on poachers operating in the region, which is why Moses opposes any additional protections to TL2.

"There’s so much conflict in the country that we don't know how many elephants are left in some of DRC’s biggest protected areas," says Dr. Samuel Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology. “One thing we do know is African elephant numbers are dropping, and a lot of ivory is coming from the Congo.” Samples from TL2 will help Wasser locate and stop poachers operating around the country.

So we’re going in. The expedition is far and away the most complicated of my life. I’ve never needed a military escort.


Officials burning a poacher's camp

Elephant Ivory Project: Young Explorers in DRC Continue Quest to Stop Elephant Poachers

By Kyle Dickman and Trip Jennings; Photographs by Andy Maser

It's been a fortunate few days. We arrived in Kinshasa on Monday exhausted from 36 hours of transit and found the Congo just as hot as we left it two years ago. On Tuesday morning, we met with Dr. Teresa Hart, a 30-year veteran of conservation in the DRC. Teresa first came to the country as a Peace Corp volunteer in 1974. She’s now in her tenth year studying bonobos, an ape found only in the DRC, in a 25,000-square mile block of forest known as TL2. The region's an elephant sanctuary on paper but animals are disappearing there faster than ever.

Explorers Depart For DRC to Fight Elephant Poaching--One Vial of Scat at Time

By Kyle Dickman and Trip Jennings

Today, I'm packing. After two years in the works, we’re kicking off the Elephant Ivory Project in earnest on Sunday morning when Andy Maser and I fly to Kinshasha, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a case of collection vials and the goal of saving a species. Here’s the back story.

A couple of years ago, I met Dr. Samuel Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington and an expert on African elephants, at a meeting for National Geographic Explorers in Seattle, Washington. Wasser has been working on a project for a decade that compares DNA sampled from seized elephant ivory to reference DNA sampled from wild elephant scat in Africa. (Just a reminder: the trade of elephant ivory has been banned internationally since 1989.) With this information, Wasser is able to determine where elephants with a DNA makeup similar to that found in the seized ivory live. Because individual elephants from the same population have many similar genes, and because poachers tend to repeatedly target specific populations, Wasser’s study is a valuable conservation tool. The information allows willing governments and NGOs to direct anti-poaching units to threatened herds, thus stopping the trade before the animals are killed.

Legendary Kayaker Hendri Coetzee Honored With Sunset River Memorial in Uganda

 
By Andrew Tolve; Photograph courtesy Chris Korbulic 

The Itanda Falls in eastern Uganda are a treacherous, quarter-mile run of rapids lined by dense jungle and heaving with Class VI whitewater from top to bottom. Hendri Coetzee, the South African kayaker killed by a crocodile on the Lukuga River in December 2010, considered this “big water kayaking in paradise.” The 35-year-old had a home in Jinja, just upriver, and had run the falls hundreds of times, including on his legendary trip from the Nile’s source-to-sea in 2004.

This past Saturday, January 8, more than 200 friends and family joined at the falls to pay tribute to Coetzee’s memory. A wooden raft filled with flowers and prayer flags, poems, hearts, and photographs, was ferried to the middle of the river at sunset, lit on fire, and set free in the rapids.

“He used to call this the center of the universe,” recalls Pete Meredith, one of Coetzee’s closest friends and the memorial’s organizer. “It was close to the heart of Africa, at the source of the Nile, the people were so friendly, and the water was amazing. This is the way he would have wanted to go.”

Many of those attending the memorial stayed until sunrise sharing stories of Coetzee, an adventurer who, in the era of Google Earth and GPS, proved there were still many beautiful corners of the world left to be explored. He had kayaked all around Africa and internationally, often alone and on lines no one had dared (or thought) to go before. And he did all this with a humility and total disregard for fame or fortune.

“Hendri was a student, and a teacher, and a devotee to his church of exploration,” says Chris Korbulic, one of the two American kayakers with Coetzee when the crocodile struck. “His exploration and adventure were his self-expression, and he didn’t need to go further with it by telling everyone about it.”

Celliers Kruger, one of Coetzee’s close friends and sponsors, recalls that Coetzee routinely turned down new kayaks in favor of an old, scratched up E Solo; insisted on learning Swahili so he could communicate with villagers during his adventures in the Congo; and pursued a degree in psychology between expeditions, not for the shiny degree but to sharpen his personal observations on life.

Coetzee once wrote me in an email, when I was hoping to feature his latest solo adventure in 2009, “As much as I like people thinking I am brave (and I do), it just seems so tasteless and used up, man survives crocodile, savages, and malaria to complete world’s hardest river bla bla bla ... Fact is people live here, 50 million of them, more than half women and children. I am not saying it can’t be dangerous; there are many ways to die here, maybe more than in other places. But the fact is it doesn’t make you Superman to survive here. Grandma is doing it.”

This spirit, in an age when exploration is so often motivated by the attention it will receive, was refreshing and important and will be missed by all those in the adventure community.